What do these headlines have in common?
Obama Pledges Support for Animal Rights
Tyranny grows in the Golden State
Microsoft seeks patent for office "spy" software
Well, Barack Obama distinguished himself as an Illinois legislator in being one of only two who opposed treating born children as persons who have constitutional rights.
He voted against the Illinois Born Alive Protection Act because, he argued:
10) Babies born alive are not protected by the Constitution
9) Babies born alive are burdensome to their mothers
8) This was a purely political bill
7) There was no proof it happened (pace all the state and federal testimony to the contrary)
6) It is a doctor's prerogative to let babies die
5) Abortionists always save children born alive during an abortion
4) It's a purely religious issue
3) There's nothing really wrong with letting babies die
2) Letting born babies live is just a tactic to trap Democrats
1) Letting born babies live would undermine Roe v. Wade
But now, he's concerned that animals may be mis-treated. Apparently there IS a universal principle to care for animals.
Even more, "I think how we treat our animals reflects how we treat each other," he said. "And it's very important that we have a president who is mindful of the cruelty that is perpetrated on animals." I think he is absolutely right.
How we treat our animals IS a reflection of how we treat each other.
If we treat our animals as persons, we will treat each other as animals.
Consider two points:
1) As Walter E. Williams points out, California is preparing not only to monitor the electrical usage of every house in the state, it also plans to create a way for the government to override how the owner of the house uses electricity in his own house. The house, ahem, the kennel we live in will be controlled by our masters.
2) At the same time, Microsoft is planning on handing both government and corporations the keys to complete monitoring of its employees, right down to blood pressure, heart rate and facial expression. Thus, our masters will be able to watch over us and care for us as every good pet deserves.
Could it be that Barack Hussein Obama is interested in treating animals well precisely because he is part of the governing elite?
From all indications, it looks as if the governing elites see the rest of the nation as animals - objects to be monitored, cared for, and overseen by government agencies who will lovingly watch over us, mercifully euthanizing us when our useful lives (as defined by the state) are at an end.
When God is gone, the only ones who can define personhood are those with power: the government and the corporation.
Either we accept that God exists and order our lives according to His laws, or we deny He does and have our lives ordered for us according to the laws of the state and corporation. We either rely on the beneficence of an all-loving God or on the beneficence of the loving masters of the state.
If we choose the latter, we must admit that none of us are persons deserving of care and respect unless our loving masters say we are.
6 comments:
Thanks for the links, Steve. I have to laugh at the CA thermostat amendment, though. The logistics would be a nightmare. What do you do to activate it? Tune it to some special frequency in the cell phone towers? Have government drones drive around in vans that turn everyone's heat down? What will they do to people whose thermostats "accidentally" break, or who intentionally wall them off behind something that obstructs radio signals?
This will either be hilarious or horrible if it passes.
Obama, on the other hand, is appalling. Pro-life laws are designed to get him to say things just like these, but it's sad to see him go there.
This reminds me of the kind of infringements on privacy and personal liberty that are common in Europe. In Germany, for example, there are strict laws about how many t.v.s you are allowed to own and operate. If you have a government permit allowing you to have one t.v., you can't have two. They have bureacratics in Germany whose job it is to walk around neighbors and zap houses with special scanners that detect how many cathode ray tubes are operating in each dwelling, and if their scanners detect more than their records say should be there, the government will order that family to surrender the unauthorised t.v.
Or, if it's not a t.v., but is something the scanners mistakenly think is a t.v. -- like a special monitor that a baby with life-threatening congenital problems needs to stay alive -- then the government will proceed to harass you for having an unauthorised "t.v." Since it's a bureacracy, they won't pay any attention to your careful explanations that their bureaucrats don't know what they're talking about, that your baby's necessary medical equipment is not an t.v. set. They will put you through hell, threatening you with fines and prison, until finally somebody with half a brain realises that all you have to do is actually visit the home and find out if there are really any unauthorised t.v.s there.
That scenario that I described has actually happened in Germany. It will happen in this country too when the leftist wackos implement their environmentalist totalitarian regime -- and I fully expect them to succeed in their hope to impose such a regime.
Uhhhh, make that, "They have bureacrats in Germany whose job it is to walk around neighborhoods . . ."
Oh, the CA thermostat would be relatively easy to implement through the electrical wiring currently in place in a house.
There have been numerous successful commercial products which create a LAN by using the electrical outlets and wiring in the house as the transport mechanism.
Something along that line could undoubtedly be rigged into the proposed thermostats. There is probably a packet traffic consideration, but that could be mitigated by playing with the polling level. Wouldn't need radio frequencies at all.
However, your observation about work-arounds are worth considering. There is only one important rule when it comes to systems management: people in systems do not do what the systems say they are doing.
Jordan - A friend of mine in the UK declined to pay the fee for national TV service and chose not to watch TV. He was constantly harassed by the TV service, who found it inconceivable that someone wouldn't watch TV, and kept trying to charge him.
Steve - should the thermostat rule become law, someone will quickly come out with an add-on that provides:
1) A defeat device that replicates the signal of the thermostat without actually changing anything
2) Backup batteries that will compensate for slight dips in power (or allow one to temporarily decrease one's dependence on grid power in response to a control signal) without actually changing the AC/ Furnace settings.
In the regions of the US that currently use intelligent metering, the computer signals for usage are received and processed out of a central location that then moderates the power going to your house, along with the computer signal to modify your local household meter and intelligent circuits. Off grid will probably be your only alternative, and then you are left to the fates of local housing laws for what type of oil/gas generator or alternate solar/wind power, etc. you may use. Currently, the houses that are using this metering are getting compensated but it is working so well (at least for them) that I think it will become common across the country in a decade or so.
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